Aileen Patterson

Aileen has around 18 years of experience and is Stonefield's lead kitchen design specialist, having trained initially in interior design in the early 2000s before deciding to specialise specifically in kitchens a few years later. She quickly realised that kitchen design was where she wanted to focus, it sits right at the intersection of how a home looks and how it actually functions day to day, and she's spent nearly two decades getting better at balancing both.

Over the years Aileen has worked on a huge range of projects, from small flat refurbishments where every centimetre needs to earn its place, to large open plan family kitchens where the challenge is making a big space feel warm and considered rather than empty. She has a particular talent for working with awkward or unusual layouts, the kind of kitchens with chimney breasts, sloped ceilings, structural columns or odd shaped extensions that need a bit of creative thinking to get right. Where some designers might see a problem to work around, Aileen tends to see it as the starting point for something more interesting than a standard layout would ever be.

What sets Aileen apart is the way she works with customers from that very first conversation. She's known for asking the kind of questions people don't always think to consider themselves, how they actually use their current kitchen, where the clutter tends to build up, whether they're planning to host more in future, or whether the school run chaos of a Tuesday morning needs to be designed around just as much as a dinner party on a Saturday. By understanding how a family really lives, she's able to translate inspiration photos and vague ideas into layouts that are not only beautiful but genuinely practical, the sort of designs that still feel right five or ten years down the line, long after the initial excitement of a new kitchen has settled into everyday life.

Aileen has also kept a close eye on how kitchen design has evolved over her career, from the rise of open plan living and kitchen islands becoming the heart of the home, through to more recent trends like handleless cabinetry, hidden storage solutions and the growing demand for kitchens that double up as home offices or utility spaces. She makes a point of staying current with materials, finishes and storage innovations, while never losing sight of the basics that make a kitchen work, good lighting, sensible workflow between the cooker, sink and fridge, and enough storage that things don't end up cluttering the worktops within a month of moving in.

Colleagues describe Aileen as someone who listens more than she talks, at least in the early stages, and customers often comment that she picked up on small details about how they live that they hadn't even mentioned out loud. It's that combination of genuine curiosity, technical know how and a strong eye for what will actually stand the test of time that has made her such a key part of the Stonefield Kitchens team.